FD.io, The Universal Dataplane, Taps Arm® Ecosystem, Adds To Growing List of New Members

Open Source Project grows member roster as Arm®, CENGN, Linaro, and Netgate commit to support high-performing software-defined infrastructures

SAN FRANCISCO – September 7, 2017 –  FD.io (“Fido”), relentlessly focused on data IO speed and efficiency supporting the creation of high-performance, flexible, and scalable software defined infrastructures, today announced Arm®, Linaro, and Netgate have joined the project at the Silver level, and Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networking (CENGN) joins FD.io as the first Associate member. The newest members further diversify FD.io’s existing roster of chip vendors, integrators, network vendors, and service providers committed to accelerating high-performing, dynamic computing environments.

FD.io offers the software defined infrastructure developer community a landing site with multiple projects fostering innovations in software-based packet processing towards the creation of high-throughput, low-latency, and resource-efficient IO services suitable to many architectures (x86, ARM, and PowerPC) and deployment environments (bare metal, VM, container). With the addition of Arm and Linaro – a leading collaborator of open source development within the Arm ecosystem – the project can expect greater integration within the Arm architecture and broader ecosystem.

“We are pleased to welcome the newest FD.io members, all of whom are helping to accelerate open source software-based packet processing,” said David Ward, FD.io Board Chair and SVP, CTO, and Chief Architect of Engineering, Cisco. “Arm joining as an official member – combined with Linaro, which champions Arm-related open source efforts – will support even greater collaboration and growth across chipsets and ecosystems. Additionally, Netgate has been a prominent code contributor as we welcome CENGN as the first Associate member, continuing the organization’s existing relationship with the community.”

The newest members are coming on following the project’s recent FD.io 17.07 release, which includes improvements to the TCP Host Stack and support for several new container dataplane interfaces that support VPP use cases, such as a VPP-based vSwitch talking to a VPP-based Virtual Network Function (VNF). The release also includes a number of new overlay protocols (e.g., MPLS over Segment Routing, GRE over IPv6, and GTP-U), and a ten percent improvement in VXLAN performance.

Learn more about the Universal Dataplane – including recent performance gains, the latest release, and VNF interoperability – in the recent webinar, “Acceleration with the Universal Dataplane – FD.io” which is available for viewing on-demand: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/12229/274463

FD.io will hold a Mini-Summit co-located with CloudNativeCon + KubeCon North America, 5 December in Austin, Texas. Join the community and learn about FD.io projects, use cases, capabilities, integration between FD.io and Kubernetes/OpenStack/ODL/OPNFV/other communities, tools, and many more exciting topics. More details, including how to submit a talk, are available here: https://fd.io/event/kubecon-north-america-dec-5-2017/

More about the newest members

Arm® technology is at the heart of a computing and connectivity revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. From the unmissable to the invisible, the company’s advanced, energy-efficient processor designs are enabling the intelligence in 86 billion silicon chips and securely powering products from the sensor to the smartphone to the supercomputer. With more than 1,000 technology partners, including the world’s most famous business and consumer brands, the Arm team is driving innovation into all areas compute is happening inside the chip, the network, and the cloud.

“Open source communities require more choices for higher performance, lower latency processing across next-generation virtualized networks,” said Noel Hurley, vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Group, Arm. “The VPP engine at the heart of the FD.io project is providing application developers with a robust set of services on top of lower level network I/O layers, OpenDataPlane, and DPDK. This is a great opportunity to showcase how the Arm ecosystem delivers packet processing acceleration with unmatched energy efficiency to VPP applications.”

CENGN (Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networking) is a consortium of industry, academic, and research leaders dedicated to accelerating the commercialization of next generation communications solutions. CENGN’s internationally recognized testing centre employs interoperability between multiple software and hardware products, providing a unique environment to commercialize advanced products, applications and services. CENGN’s fully operational data centre is running a production OpenStack environment with multiple connections to a real-world WAN including a dark fibre connection that enables connectivity speeds of more than 100Gbps. CENGN services include Proof of Concept (PoC) validation and hosting, interoperability/performance/certification testing, technical training (SDN, NFV, IPv6, ODL, OpenStack), Innovation for Hire, and Commercialization Acceleration. CENGN members include: Bell Canada, Cisco, EXFO, GENBAND, Fujitsu, Invest Ottawa, Juniper, Mitel, Nokia, Rogers, TELUS,  Wind River, and Zayo Canada.

“CENGN is proud to become FD.io’s first Associate member, a project that is making significant impacts within the open source community,” said Ritch Dusome, president and CEO, CENGN. “Working with FD.io on IO speed and efficiency will provide for more flexible and scalable networks, which is crucial for the optimization of next generation networking. Having facilitated development of the OPNFV Fast Data Stacks Project over the past year, we are excited to continue our support of FD.io as an official member of the open source project.”

Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 250 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

“Linaro has been working on the software defined networking dataplane since the launch of OpenDataPlane (ODP) in 2013. ODP is built on a functional pipeline that matches the flexible graph technology at the heart of VPP. ODP intends to provide VPP with performance gains through look-aside or inline acceleration on servers (Arm or x86), Arm-based SmartNICs, and Cloud/NFV infrastructures. We believe that FD.io is a good centralized location to provide best in class networking infrastructure technology and leverage the unique hardware acceleration capabilities provided by each architecture,” said Francois Ozog, director of the Linaro Networking Group (LNG). “We’re happy to expand our partnership with The Linux Foundation and look forward to helping extend this activity well beyond the already established ODP4VPP project, while using associated developments in the networking dataplane to benefit our members.”  

Netgate is dedicated to developing and providing secure networking solutions to businesses, government and education institutions around the world. pfSense, one of world’s most trusted open source firewalls, is actively developed by Netgate, which has an installed base of over one million firewall users. The company is extending its open-source leadership and expertise into high-performance software routers – capable of delivering compelling value at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

“FD.io’s VPP is integral to our upcoming high-performance security router which leverages VPP, DPDK, RESTCONF, Intel QuickAssist and other technologies,” said Jim Thompson, CTO of Netgate. “This new product – which can deliver over 40 Gbps IPsec throughput and 42.6 million packets per second layer three routing on commodity hardware – will soon achieve release candidate status, with commercial availability not far behind. Obviously, we are long-standing believers in the open source movement, and are both excited by FD.io’s continued progress, and proud to be a member of this growing consortium.”

About FD.io

The Fast Data Project (FD.io) “Fido” is a collaborative open source project that aims to establish a high-performance IO services framework for dynamic computing environments. The FD.io community includes Network IO, Packet Processing, and Dataplane Management Agents fostering innovations in software based packet processing towards the creation of high-throughput, low-latency, and resource-efficient IO services suitable to many architectures (x86, Arm, and PowerPC) and deployment environments (bare metal, VM, container).

FD.io is hosted by at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation rojects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

###